KHTHÔN

 

He was motionless, strapped in and bathed in his chamber since birth. The apparatus had, in fact, accommodated him since his conception in exogenosis. His body was as "clean" and objectified as possible. All his effluents were immediately eliminated, taken by probes as soon as they left his organs. A cleaning and feeding liquid was constantly irrigating his organs, making sure that they were preserved as much as possible from any decomposition. The body of Khthôn had no other value than market. The company that "archived" it had to guarantee to the beneficiary of the donation that his organs were of first quality, perfectly calibrated and functional.

The whole peripheral structure was adapted to the genetic programming of the model of which Khthôn was a clone: corpulence, weight, height, bone density, weight mass; everything was foreseen, planned, adapted, standardized. Genetic anomalies were impossible, because they were detected and eliminated before the conception of the fetus. 

Khthôn had been stored there for years, along with hundreds of thousands of other clones, all similar. 

However, since a few weeks, there had been an anomaly: Khthôn had opened his eyes. 

Normally, a being like Khthôn should never open his eyes. His life was supposed to be a never-ending hum, punctuated by more or less vital organ removals. If vital elements had to be removed from his body, this entailed a particular procedure: the putting to sleep and then the premature termination of his life. All this was as sanitized and routine as possible, but the time had long since passed for the emotions of the past. The organic body was a survivor of a bygone era, of a despicable time that we tried to forget. Bodies like Khthôn's were only used to provide organs for the latest models of new species born of transhumanist engineering. 

Khthôn could not define this sensation, he did not have the words to describe these strange movements of his soul. It was the first time that he experienced emotions, that he cried, laughed, twitched. He knew what used to be called dreams, thoughts; everything he should have been deprived of. 

If Khthôn had never learned to speak, it was not necessary for his initial function, it was not pleasant to suffer, to feel invaded by sadness and despair. Even if he could not really evaluate the extent of his frustration, Khthôn was realizing his condition, what had been done to him. He felt, little by little, frustration, anger.

Khthôn, like all the little which remained of humanity in these annihilated times, was suddenly sown by a force which had not been manifested, in this way, for several millenia. The divine spark, the life force of the planet, had managed to spring up in this attenuated being. The time had come. The seeding work of the gardeners of the universe had been ruined. The atmosphere of the Earth was polluted, the soils poisoned and the little fauna that remained had mutated or disappeared. Men were no more and they disappeared inexorably.

Until then, Khthôn had been kept in this closed box, an incubator where his hindered body was bathed. Khthôn had never been able to move or feel the wind or the heat of the sun. His nervous system and his emotional circuit had been neutralized. He, who could not feel any emotion or sensation, was now invaded by terrible thoughts, shivers, feelings of exaltation and infinite love. Tears flowed, incomprehensibly for him, from his once closed eyes. He wept over what humanity had become as much as over his own fate. Sometimes he wept with radiant joy and emotion at the beauty of the world he was discovering. He understood the formidable potential of the human project.

Khthôn was a name that he had never received. He did not have a name, he was just a number, a serial number, that he did not know. He didn't even have a recognized existence. He had never had a name because he was only a clone, artificially conceived, destined to be dismembered, taken, according to the needs of a human with a status recognized as superior. Khthôn was only a stock of laboratory organs. The evolution towards this monstrous situation had been slow, born in the United States, land of Mammon, where financiers, accountants, business people, had ended up imposing their criteria of profit before any other spiritual or moral value.

However, a voice, full of love, kept telling him that he was a man, that he belonged to a group called humanity and that he was important. This voice had given him a name, as it had to all the remaining humans on the planet. All of them had received the name Khthôn, a name forgotten by men for tens of millennia. It was however the name of the mother goddess, of their mother, of the one who gave birth to them and took them in with infinite love when their earthly journey ended.

It was the same voice that, for months, had taught Khthôn, as well as all his brothers and sisters, everything a human should know.

Khthôn was thus learning, in an accelerated way, what life generally reserved to men in several lives. He learned what was a natural conception, a birth in the womb of a mother. He was learning about men and women and their different natural environments on planet Earth. The warm and loving voice taught him what a baby, a child, a teenager and then a young adult learns through daily life. He was discovering all of this, emotions, social life, friends, feelings of cold, heat, pain, sadness, anger and joy. He also discovered the desire of the other sex, tenderness and friendship. All these emotions, all these senses, which had been forbidden to him, were now flowing in him by the will of a vital, imperious energy.  Men were being re-seeded. 

Because, unfortunately, the humanity of this cycle had come to an end. Another one had to be invented to take up the torch. Just before its extinction, the breath of humanity had to find another body. This was an event that had happened many times in the history of mankind, in the history of the planet and the galaxy. Thousands of civilizations had disappeared. Their monuments, their cities, their roads, however colossal, disappeared into the bowels of the Earth, consumed by its burning entrails, crushed by the rocks, dissolved in the molten metals. Each time, humanity forgot and had to resume its ascent towards a civilization irremediably destined to break or to disappear. 

Gê, the Mother Earth, resumed her repairing work each time, because humans, immortal souls, were indispensable to the divine plan. In spite of their intrinsic weaknesses, they constantly created ideas, images, imaginary stories, love stories, great friendships, emotions, which in turn allowed the creation of other worlds, ad infinitum. The men were part of a whole without limit that we called the universe. Their fertile souls fed the dreams of hundreds of millions of galaxies and as many parallel worlds. Khthôn learned all this because the urgency was absolute. He was going, like almost all his brothers, from the stage of a fetus to be aborted to that of a very old soul because he was carrying on his shoulders the destiny of a world.

Biologically, Khthôn was about twenty years old; spiritually and mentally, he was tens of thousands. He was taught, incredibly quickly, not only the whole history of his human cycle, but the epic of his race on all the planes it had explored. He, who had known the confinement in a chamber, was getting to know billions of souls from the past and from a future that would never come. As his soul was virgin, his heart was devoid of vices and wounds, the teaching he received passed without obstacles. He was a superiorly conceived, superiorly prepared being. 

Unlimited energy flowed through his veins and muscles. His body had grown in spite of his immobility, powerful muscles enveloped his skeleton. The latter, once fragile and brittle, had become as hard and resistant as steel. Khthôn, already genetically selected by the engineers of transhumanism to offer quality organs, had become an almost perfect being. He exceeded by far the standards of the transhumanist technology. His physical and psychological capacities, his powers exceeded anything that the artificial intelligence could have conceived or even imagined. Khthôn, by his knowledge of the past and the future, by his wisdom and his perfect knowledge of the universe and its laws, had become what was once called a demigod.

The machines of the industrial complex had, of course, spotted this tremendous change. But before they could alert the management system, it had been invaded, controlled. An omnipotent, absolute force had taken possession, not only of the management system of Khthôn, but of the whole planet and of the satellites, space stations and last spacecrafts in orbit. Everything that had been conceived, built and monitored by humans was now in the hands of the mother goddess.

The takeover of the intelligence system was instantaneous. Without any warning, the divine power took over the machines, the networks and what was left of this last human civilization in the space of a breath. There was no need for software, buttons, cables, everything that was, inert or not, from the past, the present, as well as the future, belonged to the divine. Nothing had ever been taken away from it. This immutable truth, forgotten by the materialistic crowds, hidden by the globalists, imposed itself as it had been foreseen, and partially predicted, since the dawn of time by numerous religions or sacred teachings. 

There were not many people left on earth. After a few generations of pseudo-freedom left to terrorized beings, exhausted by planned health crises, the globalist system had finally imposed the enslavement of the survivors. Under the pretext of civil wars, famines or protection by the globalist state, humanity had been rounded up, locked up in large FEMA camps where it was forcibly vaccinated, assigned to tasks for the competent, eliminated for the weak and useless. 

The goal of 500 million slaves, engraved in the granite of Elberton, Georgia, at the end of the 20th century, was quickly surpassed. In their madness, the globalists had led humanity to its doom. Billions of human beings had been sacrificed in fratricidal wars. Great nations had confronted each other with nuclear bombs, countless wars of survival had eliminated entire peoples. Pollution, famines organized by powerful allies, genetically modified foods, sterilizing or deadly vaccines, everything had been used so that the rest of a panicked humanity was led like sheep to the FEMA camps. There, mothers were separated from their children, husbands from their wives. Heads were shaved, personal belongings were confiscated, individuals were bullied.

Methodically, friendships were separated, solidarity was broken, and hope was taken away. Sometimes an entire FEMA unit was eliminated, including the guards.

Over the generations, human beings had been artificially conceived in these camps and spent their lives there. Each time, there were fewer of them, living shorter lives. 

Finally, the sacred number was reached: 499, 999,999 individuals. But the mechanics of destruction had broken down. The destruction had continued. The individuals in charge of the supervision and the elimination were selected psychopaths. They had continued to kill, to torture, to eliminate without restraint. In spite of the instructions, they went to the end of their pathology and their conditioning. Those who were sent to stop them had the same profile. They turned against the elites themselves. Several guarded residences were attacked, the inhabitants massacred, raped, hanged or had their throats slit. Faced with this barbarity, the elites panicked. They locked themselves in their communities, served by sterilized and lobotomized slaves to be faithful and harmless, guarded by robots.

At the time of Khthôn, only a few thousand individuals, often very weakened, still populated the planet. And the life left prematurely these debris of humans conceived in exogenosis. There was no longer any desire to live in these mutilated or aborted beings. In spite of massive injections of vaccines, serums, vitamins and medicines of all kinds, they died prematurely of everything: viruses, bacteria, cancers, necroses, infections, suicides especially, decimated even the poor things which vegetated, like Khthôn, in their caissons. Those who could still move were stunned, hindered, by the control programs. They lived tasteless lives, without the slightest autonomy, attached to a machine, a function. There was no more laughter, spontaneity, companionship, love, sexuality. They were a mass of zombies, servants, sex slaves kept alive without dignity. They were dropping like flies, committing suicide, letting themselves die. They could no longer be held back, no longer get anything out of them. Little by little, the management staff, the maintenance technicians, the servants, the sex slaves, disappeared. They were replaced by robots and artificial intelligence systems, but the supervisory staff remained indispensable. Eventually, there was a shortage of them. Many communities died of hunger, thirst and disease. There were no more doctors, no more nurses, no one to look after the communities.

On the elite side, the situation was no better. Generations of individuals, conceived by exogenous breeding to avoid the pains of childbirth to indifferent mothers, had produced isolated, suicidal, psychopathic offspring. None of them had the motivation to even want to survive in a world without love, without friendship, without contact with others. 

Individuals who had had poor parents produced children themselves by technological proxy. The instinct of parenthood disappeared progressively, until the very idea of reproducing no longer seemed relevant. The few survivors of this logic of no return became depraved, nihilistic, encysted in morbid and inexorably suicidal thoughts. Barely twenty percent of the children of the elite made it past the age of fifteen. 

The globalist elites wanted to find in space an elsewhere, a new transhumanist adventure. But space was cruel. All the expeditions, the experiments of life in space ended in deaths, slow agonies, asphyxiated astronauts, begging the Earth to save them. The elites watched, dumbfounded, as their chimera crashed against the reality of the infinite void. In spite of prostheses, electronic replacements, the assistance of artificial intelligence, space was inaccessible to material technologies. What the sages and mediums had been experiencing and visiting since the beginning of time remained closed to the materialists of the esoteric sect.

Most of the members of the oligarchy had followed the movement out of a worldly spirit, to keep the esteem of their peers or to remain in the circuit of the privileges of their caste. They had participated, sometimes with a little disgust, in the Satanist meetings, in the worship ceremonies. They had turned a blind eye to the human sacrifices, out of fear, had joined the sexual orgies for a time until they were disgusted with themselves. When the machine had gone haywire, when the epidemics had wiped out the world, they had observed all this from a distance, protected by multiple antidotes and the privileges due to their rank. When the senile and fanatical old men who led their sect decided to plunge the world into chaos, they became concerned, distanced themselves and isolated themselves as much as possible. Their children, conceived by exogenous means and inheriting only a superficial education, had less distance from the system and from the globalist values. They were fanatical and pushed the system to its limits. 

The only free individuals, in the end, were the descendants of the rebels who had voluntarily exiled themselves, from the very beginning of the establishment of the mundialist regime, to the most hostile places on the planet, the deserts, the mountains and the contaminated areas. Of course, these dreamers, poets and outsiders were conscientiously eliminated over the years. The globalist armies hunted them, as they once hunted the great beasts. Their harsh living conditions, the lack of hygiene, the lack of medical care and food left emaciated bodies, mutilated people with rotten teeth. Little by little, education had been abandoned. These people lived like primitives.

But at least there was still an instinct for survival in these small nomadic communities. The daily struggle for survival left flashes of defiance in the eyes of these men and women who had been running from combat drones and army raids all their lives.

Those who had survived were particularly resilient. They had exceptional genetics, unique skills in daily combat. While there was no longer any capacity for deep thought among them, and their ability to express themselves was increasingly limited, there were still some forms of tactical intelligence, when inbreeding had not destroyed them.

As the years went by, these hordes of wretches had noticed that the globalist camp was losing ground and disappearing. There were no more mercenaries to come and fight them or even to supervise the combat drones. There was no one left to plan attacks against them. They realized that the machines were no longer receiving combat orders. They watched as the combat drones were now paused, performing regular self-tests, automatic maintenance, and never leaving their bases again.

The rebel communities became bolder and ventured near the military camps, but were unable to enter because of the automated surveillance systems, which destroyed any intruders and which they were unable to neutralize. 

They entered the FEMA concentration camps, which were less well protected against intrusion. They were surprised to find large empty rooms, huge production units at a standstill. They discovered, sometimes, decaying corpses, people who had worked there and had been forgotten or left behind. The mundialist camp left machines in a state of abandonment and technologies that were no longer used. 

The rebels now had a free hand. They wanted to get into the elite communities, into those circles that had condemned their ancestors to death, harassing them everywhere, terrorizing them, pursuing them with an unfailing hate. Despite the automated protection systems, they managed to break into some communities.

They found a few survivors, old people on life support, elderly servants and many dead bodies. Again, the system was not working. 

The rebels ransacked the billionaire's villas that had hypnotized their parents, gorged themselves on artificial food that made them sick, killed the few living people they found and then returned to their world, to their routine of survival.

The last old men of the oligarchy had thus ended up dying, even after having exceeded one hundred years. Those who had attempted the space adventure had perished in space, suffocated, crushed, burned, in a thousand attempts to travel to the stars. Each of these failures had been watched live. The traumatic sight of successful, exceptional young men and women dying one after the other, sobbing or begging to be rescued, broke the momentum towards space. The oligarchs watched their insane dream shatter and, with teary eyes, gave in to despair.

The immensity of the black sky remained hostile, empty, icy. There was no place for human beings, even considerably increased, in the sidereal void. With these foolish and proud astronauts, the Luciferian dreams of transhumanism, of returning to an original planet from which the aliens who had seeded the first human slaves, had died. The oligarchs gave up dreaming, whether of the stars or of anything else. 

But since they had burned and destroyed all of humanity's past, they had no way back. Traditional human communities had been destroyed, families separated. Group and individual friendships were a forgotten habit. Each individual was now isolated, facing a screen or connected to a virtual reality and to artificial and fleeting emotions. New species of humans, totally artificial, had no chance to survive. Nothing had any meaning anymore, no tradition or collective dream had been preserved. Beings were born and grew up without tenderness, without social life, without exchanging with others. Man, once a gregarious creature, had become solitary.

There was no longer anyone, in the reserved quarters of the hyper-class, to worry about rebellion, resistance, the survival of humanity. Everything had become a collective dystopia. 

The elites had vainly tried to survive, to make their offspring survive. But the process of collective death had begun. Individuals were dying, suppressing themselves, disappearing without offspring, without reference points, without anyone or any idea to turn to. Life expectancy dropped rapidly. There was no longer any competence, nor any will, to build a collective project and maintain a society of men that had no transcendent perspective.

Only nature had seized the opportunity. Plants and roots pierced the concrete walls, reducing to dust the steel beams and the proud glass and concrete structures of globalist architecture. The fauna and flora took back their rights. Man, a parasite disembarked from the stars, was finally leaving his place.

Khthôn lived in a unit far from any human presence. He had never been worried by looters. One morning, he had felt the probes withdraw from his body. The pain had been intense. But since the beginning of his life, he had only known the martyrdom of a body subjected to the brutalities of machines insensitive to the emotions of a replacement clone. He preferred to suffer in his flesh than to undergo all the evils of the soul that knowledge had brought him. Khthôn's soul suffered, yes, from the failure of this earth colony and the waste of billions of humans that the insane globalist enterprise had caused.

After the withdrawal of the probes, the biological liquid in which Khthôn bathed, withdrew. Khthôn felt the ambient cold. He already knew what this sensation was. Shivering, he got up and left his chamber whose lid had opened.

Even though he could not see this large room, his field of vision being limited by the narrow opening of the porthole of his tank, he was not disconcerted by the spectacle offered by this immense room where hundreds of thousands of tanks similar to his own rested. Almost all the chambers were empty, their corpses dissolved by the hygienic liquids in charge of cleaning them. 

Khthôn took the time to visit and check each of the chambers. He found a few individuals like himself. All had received the same education and were vibrating with intelligence. There were some men and mostly women. Khthôn observed his fellows without a word, then he left, alone. The others had done the same and dispersed each one on their own. Khthôn knew that they had existed for a few weeks. He also knew that he would not be destined to be with them. They would have to travel the world and meet other humans, humans of a different strain. Perhaps he would make friends, companions on adventures that would be written about; perhaps he would meet a female that he would impregnate. He knew that there was love and friendship written into his future.

He went out of the room, scrupulously visiting all the rooms, sometimes crossing paths with a brother or sister he did not know. There was no one else in the huge building. The rooms were empty, the control desks were impeccably tidy, cleaned, emptied until recently of any dust, any traces of cups, any stains of coffee, semen or urine that might have been left by the last humans who had frequented the place years before. 

But the cleaning robots were no longer blowing. The dust would return. 

If there was no more movement, insects and rodents were already coming back to haunt these places that had claimed to eradicate them. Khthôn watched these animals wandering here and there, going about their business. 

He went to a room where some of his brothers were already, others arrived. They all stood in a circle and sang the song of the angels. The building vibrated. This song had not been sung for thousands of years. It was the song of pure intelligence, the farewell song of connected souls.

When the silence fell, he felt a kind of tension on his face: he was smiling. He remembered that he had felt this emotion before, during his learning phase. There was not only suffering in this world.

He listened, one last time, to the muffled sound of the others retreating and exiting the building. He went out among the last.

He looked at the door in front of him. The door locks had been disconnected. The doors were all open. 

Outside, there was a road on his right. He turned away from it. He saw a small hill. He climbed it and looked at the view. All he could see was a wasteland, concrete buildings or tin sheds crumbling or crumbling, overgrown with plants. He looked at the silhouettes of his brothers and sisters who had grown up like him in this cloning unit.

During all those weeks of preparation for his release, in his chamber, he had explored the planet. From the barren heights of the exosphere to the deepest crevices of the earth, he had seen, felt, almost touched everything that the planet had preserved, sheltered, protected from the destructive madness of man. 

He had then felt the need for life. For that, as the oldest religions taught, it was necessary to destroy and to start a cycle of regeneration.

Khthôn closed his eyes. A kind of bubble of energy and light soon surrounded his body, which rose into the air above the earth. It was time for everything to be accomplished.

The earth shook and trembled. All the stored nuclear charges exploded, the bowels of the earth opened up, releasing molten metal and volcanic rocks. Everything was burned, destroyed, pulped. In a landscape filled with toxic fumes, the waters of the oceans and springs covered the land and instantly turned to steam. Soon the waters covered the entire horizon. The process of covering and resetting took days and days. The planet shook, hissed, exploded, releasing energy from its core. The winds howled in the skies.

Designated beings, like Khthôn, floated in the sky, unaffected by the torments of the earth, indifferent to the winds, storms and radiation. They were immersed in deep meditation. They were shaping what was to be.

Gradually, long afterwards, the earth became pristine again. It was ready to receive other heroes, other epics. Ge wanted to receive the writers of a new page of its history.  

The sky was limpid, the waters softened, new continents had emerged, already teeming with a new life. Khthôn went back down to the ground. He landed gently on a bank, near a river. 

He walked for a long time, smelling the air full of a warm humidity, listening to the cry of birds and flying insects whose peaceful humming filled the air. Khthôn heard a song, a melody which was intended for him. 

He walked without haste, he already knew the continuation of this episode. He vibrated however of excitement and enthusiasm, but he did not want to waste this moment. 

It is thus without surprise, but with wonder that he discovered it with the turning of a clearing. She was there, lying on her side, watching him with amusement. He took the time to detail her with his eyes. She was perfect, obviously.